Customer Reviews

Hiking Alone: Trails Out, Trails Home

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In the introduction to Hiking Alone, poet, essayist and artist Mary Beath writes, "In many ways my story is an old one, so familiar it seems almost iconic. Go West. Unbind. Connect to the land. Link your inner journey with the outer one. As a woman, unblock your voice and speak your experience. But within those broad outlines, any individual life unfolds in a complex way..."

Beath's memoir in essays does unfold in a complex way, moving through time and place in a wonderfully non-linear fashion. Despite the title, it's not really about hiking, nor about being alone. It's much broader. This story of Beath's life examines capital "L" life: who we are, why we're here, how we live, and how we learn to live. As she moves from New York to Arizona to Gotham, Nebraska to New Mexico to Colorado's Weminuche Wilderness to the hot sands and cool waters of the Sea of Cortez to Zuni Pueblo to Brazil and finally to a vision quest along New Mexico's Mimbres River, Beath untangles the threads of her life, until at last, she can see herself--and be herself--more or less whole.

It's the rare writer who can weave together such a set of disparate narratives, and it's the rare writer who can explore traditional agriculture as deftly as the politics of lobbying Congress on wilderness bills and the feel of a whale shark's skin, much less come through a vision quest speculating about reconfigured neural pathways. Beath is such a rare writer, and her journey through her "zigzaggy" life is as illuminating and vivid as her carefully honed prose.

Beath returns to the slippery nature of story near the end of Hiking Alone: "None of us, of course, can tell another the whole story; and the substitution of story for experience inevitably brings up the limitations of language. Representation with words can never capture the entire physical, emotional, memory-washed reality of a life..."

But if Mary Beath is telling the story, it'll come close, and the words will ring clear and true.

by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

To say that Mary Beath--artist, naturalist, activist, poet, author--has a handle on the value of risk-taking is an understatement. Throughout this engrossing collection of essays, she constantly weighs not only the risks to her personal safety on extended camping trips in isolated backcountry but also the value of emotional risk-taking as an independent woman when it comes to relationships, career and life journey as well.

"We all see the future from a distance, and that field of safety can't ever be total, in mountains or not. Certainty is an illusion that's part of a rigid structure concocted by anxiety," she notes in the title essay.

In most of the nine essays, Beath uses her wilderness journeys an as opportunity to explore her past: a zig-zag path from undergraduate science major to art school, though the steamroller of New York City's overstimulation to the inner peace she finally discovered in New Mexico. It wasn't until she was in her 40s and living in Albuquerque that she began a personal writing "practice" to try to release her voice and speak up for who she is and who she had become. Her decision to claim that voice resulted in an award-winning collection of poems ("Refuge of Whirling Light", UNM Press, 2006).

Raised an only child by both doting parents and grandparents whose intense but controlling love eventually became a burden, Beath early on created personal resistance to any attempt to force her to conform, whether it was to her parents' expectations or the limited choice between academia or marriage presented to her in the early 1970s.

By exploring both the wilderness and the inner landscape of her writing practice, she discovers in hindsight the perfect alignment of the crooked path she chose instead. That she was actually living out the defeated dreams of her father, already in his 40s when she was born, is an insight she relates with tenderness and grace in the essay "I Love Wild Thunderstorms Myself."

Born in Nebraska at the turn of the last century, Beath's father had headed off to college and graduate school during the Great Depression with hopes of going to New York and becoming a great writer. Beath discovered in a slim diary her mother gave her on his death that he failed his comprehensive exams for the PhD program at Columbia University and returned to Nebraska dejected and depressed.

Eventually he moved to Washington DC and went to law school, trying to "fix his life so it looked approximately like the American Dream," she notes. "He felt like a failure in much of what he attempted, and by going to law school, he finally jettisoned his dreams and made a more acceptable life. For his only child, he wanted something better. But I noted daily, if privately, that I risked repeating his life in my own way."

When she finally decides to leave New York, where she had lived for 10 years, and moves to the West and the wide open spaces that her father had left behind, Beath takes a detour through his hometown in Nebraska. Her "ah-ha" moment fairly leaps off the page.

"Instead of following my father's ill-fated footsteps, I'd reversed course. I wasn't on a path where I must give up my dreams in order to have a chance at a satisfying life. I'd returned from the East to the West, the real West, way beyond the hundredth meridian, to fulfill the dreams of his younger self, the dreams he'd had long before I was born. This realization struck me like a gust from one of Albuquerque's summer monsoons. I'd been released from a family curse."

Beath's luminous writing is at its best when she describes her surroundings and her insights during her many solitary hiking expeditions. In the essay "Hiking Alone," she writes: "Two hundred elk, a mile away across one wide scooped bowl, suddenly raced in a pointillistic burst like a land-bound flock of chikadees. Half of southern Colorado framed miniscule, purple trunks of blooming elephant's head. I became both small and enormous myself, the paradox part of a deep phylogenetic truth that extended back to the single-cell life that collectively covered the planet, further back to original stardust."

The final piece, "A Cloud of Impetuous Rivers," about a grueling 10-day guided vision quest in the Gila she undertakes on the dubious premise of being a writer/spy instead of a full-fledged seeker, would have benefitted from some slash-and-burn editing; at over 160 pages it's easily 100 too long, diluting the deeply symbolic truths and personal mythology that she discovers among the cottonwoods and relates with poetic intensity.

Beath's writing flows with organic grace but perhaps the inclusion of leaden, reasearch-heavy essays could have been rethought; they make for an uneven tone to the collection. But the bulk of the pieces provide a cohesive and beautifully articulate map of the road less taken by an intensely independent and deeply thoughtful woman.

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